Faith Lehane exhaled, dark eyes narrowed in concentration as she walked through the not-so-crowded Cleveland, Ohio airport, her small carry-on bag slung over one shoulder as she made her way to the luggage area to pick up her suitcase. She hadn't actually thought that bringing a suitcase was necessary; after all, she didn't know how long it was that she would be staying in Lima, Ohio or what it was, exactly, that she might need. But Cordelia had insisted that she pack heavy rather than light, and Faith knew that at least to some degree it would ease the other girl's mind about her trip, even if Cordelia refused to admit that she had any concern whatsoever than the possibility of Faith running out of clean and Cordelia-approved clothing in her absence.
"I know you, Faith Lehane, and what you'll end up doing is wearing the same pair of jeans the entire time, three different tank tops, and turning your underwear inside out," Cordelia had accused, rolling her eyes and shaking her head, even as she carefully folded an extra sweater into the suitcase she had thrust in Faith's direction. "Ohio is a state that actually has changes in the weather. Snow is an actual event instead of a mythological non possibility that only comes to save vampire lives from approaching apocalypses. Cleavage tops and holey jeans aren't going to cut it."
She had taken over the process of packing as soon as she realized that Faith was trying to pack stakes, a battle axe, and one of her favorite knives among the six or seven different outfits Cordelia had demanded she bring, harrumphing and sighing with exasperation as she muttered aloud to herself.
"Right, Miss I Know Exactly What I'm Doing Here, Cordelia, you are SO good at this, that's exactly why you're trying to take friggin' medieval weapons through airport x-rays and security, 'cause then you can get arrested and have to Judo chop your way onto the plane and force the pilot to take you by hijacking because you haven't watched even one movie where the moronic criminal tries to sneak a bomb on the plane and gets his ass handed to him. You know what, let me do this…besides, the girl is like, sixteen years old and a cheerleader, if you show up in holey jeans with an axe in one hand and a stake in the other, she's going to round off kick you in the face and gag you with her pompoms. What do you think you're gonna have to do to her anyway that requires six different deadly objects?"
"Hey, you never know what might end up going down," Faith had defended herself mildly, shrugging her shoulders before playfully bumping one of them into Cordelia's. "She's a Slayer and like you said, a cheerleader. Think back to the last cheerleader Slayer we knew and all the insanity that flew at her like magnets and tell me you wouldn't like an axe or two for back up."
"Buffy was a cheerleader for like, two minutes, because a crazy old woman was crippling us and setting us on fire, and not in your crazy redneck angel guy kind of way that goes away in thirty seconds if you pray loud enough," Cordelia rolled her eyes, adding a toothbrush and toothpaste to Faith's rapidly filling luggage. "I looked this girl up too, she's a national champion and she's been on TV. Even if it was a political smear commercial, it was still one time more than I've ever been, and she doesn't even have hips. She-"
"Cor, what does the size of this chick's hips have to do with anything other than you being a drooling perve sizing up the up and coming baby gays to see if they outshine you?" Faith had asked, already snickering to herself and bracing against the blow that she knew was coming even before Cordelia's fist shot out at her, hitting her in the shoulder with surprising force. One thing Faith had made sure to teach her in the last two years was how to throw a decent punch, and Cordelia made sure to practice on her with what Faith considered a probably disproportionate but not exactly unwelcome frequency.
"I'm just saying, you need to have clothes that don't look homeless chick chic if you want this girl to take you seriously," Cordelia had maintained, before lowering her eyes back to her folding and muttering to herself, "Or maybe I shouldn't be encouraging you."
Hearing the bit of jealousy in her tone, Faith had come behind her and wrapped her arms around the taller girl's waist, arching her neck a little to be able to rest her chin on Cordelia's shoulder. She squeezed her lightly, her thumb stroking over the curve of Cordelia's hip bone as she said in a playful but still serious tone, "Only room for one hot cheerleader in my world, how could I stand to learn even more useless facts about hair products and bimbo celebrities that I'm not allowed to beat up on?"
Cordelia rolled her eyes, huffing another seemingly exasperated breath, but Faith could see the corners of her lips curve into a small smile, and her hand moved to cover Faith's, lightly squeezing her fingers as she leaned back into the other girl's chest.
"I don't know. I'm sending you off to give a crying shoulder to a super flexible teenaged cheerleader more famous than I am, with an obvious boob job and who of COURSE just happens to be a lesbian. If she was blonde, I'd just save us both the trouble and hand you a friggin' whip because you know she'd use it on you with relish."
Faith had just laughed, her arms tightening around Cordelia, and the hand on her hip slowly shifted lower, rubbing the top of her thigh. She could feel the slight change in Cordelia's breathing as she stroked her through the girl's tight pants, with the exact pressure and speed she knew she most enjoyed, and she let her breath hit the back of Cordelia's neck as she lowered her voice to a smoky murmur she knew sometimes made her shudder with enjoyment to hear.
"You know damn well I can come up with better uses for a whip than handing it over to a teenaged girl."
"Ew. You are so disgusting, I swear I'm not letting you use Willow's Netflix account anymore because it's obviously warping your kinks into spirals," Cordelia retorted, but Faith could hear her voice grow a little huskier to, her heart beating faster against Faith's arm.
When Faith brushed Cordelia's hair back from her neck, kissing its exposed skin, she felt her relax further against her, and when Faith reached up to turn her chin to her, pressing her lips to Cordelia's gently at first, then with more pressure, deepening the kiss, Cordelia kissed her back with no hesitation, one hand reaching to firmly twine through Faith's hair and giving a light tug like she knew by now Faith enjoyed. When they pulled apart, Cordelia was fighting not to smile, even as she rolled her eyes yet again.
"Whatever….I still think her boobs are a really botched job."
Faith had rolled her eyes back at her, giving her a little nudge, but she too couldn't stop her smile. In the nearly three years that she had come to know and grow close to Cordelia, she had come to understand that for Cordelia, this entire conversation was almost the same thing as the other girl telling her that she loved her, and Faith knew that her own response was pretty much the same thing as telling her that she loved her back.
Sometimes it was difficult to believe that it had been two years since she and Cordelia left Sunnydale for Los Angles, in pursuit of a different way of life. Cordelia had hoped to become an actress, and Faith had simply hoped to make a life of her own, as long as it was with Cordelia. A life free of other's expectations and perceptions of her, in a town where no one knew her name. Having recently gotten her GED, she figured that she would get a job, Cordelia would search for work in acting, and somehow, together, they would figure out what they wanted in the next stage of their lives.
It hadn't turned out quite the way either of them had anticipated. Whereas Cordelia had gone forth starry-eyed, anticipating fame, fortune, and a glamourous acting career just waiting for her arrival, reality had been somewhat sobering. As it turned out, there were far more girls wanting to be actresses than there were acting jobs needing girls to fill them, and the vast majority of those girls available were much blonder, thinner, more experienced, and had more connections- and a lot more willingness to give sexual favors- than Cordelia herself was. A few months after settling into their shared apartment, Cordelia had only received a single offer- and that was for topless dancing, a job she'd never applied for in the first place.
Faith had tried to remain supportive and encouraging, knowing how badly Cordelia wanted this for herself, but it was difficult for either of them to remain optimistic when Faith's job in a construction company- a job she immediately won by sheer demonstration of strength, not to mention her reference of Xander- was their only source of income. Cost of living, not to mention their apartment, was much higher in Los Angeles than in Sunnydale, and it wasn't long before they were genuinely struggling.
Faith's own intention had been to take time away and apart from being one of the Chosen Two, to figure out who she was now, after one very eventful year, and what she wanted. She was seventeen, nearly an adult, and already felt herself to be in all the ways that mattered. Los Angeles would be a place to give her a fresh start in life all over again, a chance to take the newly content and confident person that her time in Sunnydale had shaped her into becoming, and apply it towards whatever she decided would be her next thing in life. She had thought she wanted and needed that time, that slaying was an option, rather than a genuine calling; she had thought of it as a piece of her rather than an important part of who she was and what she valued.
It hadn't long for her to realize she was wrong. For one thing, there were the demons- there seemed to be more of them in Los Angeles than even vampires. They seemed drawn to her like a freaking magnet, and it was all the more frequent in encountering them because unlike vampires, they had no problem with going out during the day time. Faith always carried a stake and an easily concealed knife with her, just out of habit from life on the Hellmouth, but she hadn't known that they would be quite so necessary in daily life in Los Angeles as well. And somehow, even though she certainly wasn't running her own mouth about it, every single one of them seemed to know at a glance that she was a Slayer.
One attempted kidnapping of Cordelia, several foiled death plots against Faith, and several murdered body discoveries later, and it became obvious to Faith that having a normal, quiet, anonymous life was simply not meant to be for her. She couldn't ignore the obvious "evil issue, "as Cordelia witheringly called it, in Los Angeles, any more than she could in Sunnydale; it made her feel edgy and restless to even attempt to.
It took all of three months for her to get in touch with Angel, who she knew had also migrated into the city from Sunnydale, and ask him if he, too, was aware of the "evil issue" surrounding them. As it turned out, Angel was not only aware, he was forming what Faith had thought with great amusement to be his own private Batman wannabe company. Named Angel Inc., Angel's business was intended to "help the helpless," in situations of strange or supernatural influence, which often translated to tracking down monsters, demons, vampires, and sinister humans associated with them.
At the time that she first spoke to him, Angel's "company" was more like a partnership, consisting of only himself and a half demon visionary named Doyle. With only a little talking up and a quiet request on Angel's part, it soon expanded to include Faith, as fellow partner and out based "agent," and Cordelia, as their secretary and assistant researcher. Or something. The fact that Cordelia couldn't type, had her own interesting and indecipherable filing system, had much to be learned in the way of phone manners and people skills, and had no supernatural powers or abilities was tempered by the fact that she did rather badly need a job, and she, unlike any other young woman of dubious skills up for a secretarial position, was not only aware of the supernatural, she was fairly skilled in dealing with it on a rather frequent basis. Within the next several months, Wesley Wyndham Pryce had also joined their gang, as well as a streetwise young man named Charles Gunn and a quirky but very intelligent young woman nicknamed Fred. Somehow, Faith had developed not only a place where she could be respected and appreciated for herself, her skills, and her abilities, but also a family of sorts, without ever having thought it to be possible. As different as they were from each other in knowledge, appearance, personalities, and strengths, and as vastly annoying as they could be, Faith had come to feel deep fondness for her coworkers. She knew that she would do whatever it took to protect any one of them- and she actually believed that it was a mutual feeling on their parts towards her.
It wasn't the life that either she or Cordelia had expected or been looking for, but now that they had it, Faith wouldn't have chosen for it to be different. She was happy, she was content in herself, her life, and relationships, and although sometimes her old thoughts, memories, and insecurities crept back into her mind, she could almost always refocus now on her present. She lived in the now, and for once, that was not a result of a struggle to simply survive and get through, but a deliberate choice intended to keep herself focused on what was important, needed, and true.
Faith wasn't even 21 years old yet, but she already felt incredibly different from the seventeen year old girl, straggling through each day back in Sunnydale. Her life was hardly routine or even comfortable- there was way too much chaos, blood, and gore involved for that to ever be a possibility- but it was hers by choice, and she would never give it up for something easier.
It was through Angel Inc. that Faith had wound up in the Cleveland airport at all. Many of the cases that she and the others took on were a result of visions from Doyle, given to him, according to him and Angel at any rate, by The Powers That Be. Doyle would have a mental image of a person, place, or activity, sometimes with certain facts associated with them, and he and the others would take the information and use it to help an innocent, solve a murder or violent crime, or prevent something evil from occurring.
For Faith, who had had her own frequent experiences with the apparently holy beings over the past few years through her own guardian angel, Earl, this mysterious "power" of Doyle's sounded a little too close to her own situation of having a bossy, wisecracking, and apparently all-knowing holy being follow her around giving her orders that he preferred to term "tasks." On one of the occasions that Earl had popped in on her, shortly after she had met Doyle, she had asked him whether "The Powers That Be" and himself or other angels had any sort of connection, and she had received nothing close to a satisfactory answer- which was, she had grown to suspect over time, Earl's way of confirming her questions without ever actually saying so out loud.
Doyle's latest vision, directing Faith towards her current destination, had been that of a young Hispanic-looking girl, slapping a young man's face with enough force for his neck to break. Doyle had seen flashes of the same girl in a cemetery with vampires, Faith at her side, and a school sign reading William McKinley High School. This had been more than enough information for them to begin to piece together a picture of what it was that had or was about to occur with the young adults in question in his vision, and Angel Inc.'s part in the matter had become clear.
There was only a small number of Hispanic female students at William McKinley High School, and it was easy enough for Fred to break into the school's computer system and search its database with Doyle for him to recognize the face of Santana Lopez, the girl in his vision. Santana was seventeen, the only child of Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, a plastic surgeon, and Maribel Lopez, an interior decorator. The identity of the male in Doyle's vision was somewhat harder to identify, but Doyle eventually recognized him in the database as Finn Hudson, the school's quarterback. A common denominator in the two of them was involvement in the school's Glee Club, as identified on their school profiles.
Santana Lopez had no criminal record and only minor disciplinary infractions in school, although it had been noted to all that two of those infractions were fighting other students on school property. Having been informed of this, Faith had raised an eyebrow; she had thought that girls who were attractive cheerleaders from wealthy backgrounds never got busted for anything. But then, Santana Lopez was a triple minority- a fact soon discovered when Cordelia's research stumbled upon the local political commercial and its controversy in outing her as a lesbian student. Hearing Cordelia recount this, with no little disgust in her tone, Faith's initial eye rolls and impression of another Buffy type, up and coming, to work with, had softened and changed. This girl might be a rich cheerleader, but as Cordelia Chase herself had taught her, that didn't indicate that she wasn't going through some pretty tough shit in her life.
It had taken a call to Sunnydale to Giles, and his call to the Watcher's Council in England, to confirm what Faith had suspected as soon as it became clear in their research that Santana was indeed a human girl, leading a fairly normal life until the time of the incident in Doyle's vision. The girl was a Slayer, and unfortunately for her and everyone else around her, had absolutely no idea as to what that even meant, let alone how it now concerned her and her life.
It had become pretty clear to Faith over the past few years, both from her own dealings with them and from Buffy's, that the Watcher's Council were much more likely to screw things up than to actually help the Slayers they were supposedly guiding and assisting do better in their jobs. In the case of Santana Lopez, they had clearly screwed up pretty badly, because it was only after Giles's call that they even acknowledged her as a former potential, let alone the newest Slayer.
It had been almost a year now since Buffy's sacrificial death for the sake of saving her sister Dawn's life (and that of the rest of the world). She had been resurrected less than two months later- a decision that, as difficult as it had been for Buffy, was something Faith couldn't help but be grateful for. The other Slayer's relationship with her had been strained and complex more than it had been easy and affectionate, but she had nevertheless come to regard Buffy over time as truly a part of her family just as much as she now did Cordelia, Angel, Wesley, Doyle, and even Fred and Gunn, on some level. Buffy was her sister Slayer, even at a distance and with some undercurrent of rivalry always there, and she had felt after her death as thought a piece of herself had been torn away. Although another Slayer had been called in the wake of Buffy's death, Faith didn't know her, didn't even want to know her identity, not when she knew that eventually, this girl would die too. Up until Buffy's resurrection she had struggled, all the more so because Angel's devastation was impossible to take. Only Cordelia and often Earl could really ease her grief, and although she knew deep down that Willow's actions had been wrong, she could feel nothing but gratitude towards the girl for bringing Buffy back into the world.
She had not kept up or cared about, or even much thought about, the Slayer that had been raised up in Buffy's death. She didn't know how many had died and been called since. What was important was that the last Slayer's death had resulted in Santana Lopez being called, and the Watcher's Council, busy with the chaos during Glory's time on earth and then with Buffy's death after and what this entailed for them and Sunnydale's Hellmouth, had neglected to educate and train the potentials they had earlier identified. Santana, therefore, was now an active Slayer who was completely ignorant of her new powers.
And this was where Faith came in. As the only Slayer among Angel Inc., and the only person in the company included as part of Doyle's vision, it had been decided that she would be the one to get to Santana as fast as she could, certainly before the Watcher's Council bumbled in and screwed things up even further, and help to educate, train, and assist her- and safeguard her from being legally penalized, if necessary. And to her own lack of enthusiasm, she was to go alone.
It had just sort of worked out that way. Angel, with his sun aversion, obviously could only travel across the country in very specialized circumstances that couldn't be guaranteed. Cordelia had just signed up for local college courses and couldn't afford to miss the classes and potentially have to drop out, losing the money that she had managed to scrape together to afford it. Gunn had no interest or inclination to fly across the country to talk to what he referred as a "little girl with deadly weapon hands," and Fred, Doyle, and Wesley, despite Wesley's indignant protests, were judged to be more likely to make the girl nervous and agitated rather than be able to settle the situation for the better. Seemed to Faith that she herself wasn't exactly known for her skills of diplomacy, but somehow, it had come to be that she was the one to try her hand.
As she had watched Cordelia finish packing for her, still giving frequent sarcastic commentary as she went, Santana had found her thoughts drifting frequently from what Cordelia was saying to the Lopez girl, wondering what the girl must be thinking, how she must be feeling after what had happened.
For Faith, being identified as a Potential Slayer at age fifteen had been one of the best things that ever happened to her. Being taken into her Watcher's home, given steady meals, attention and concern on a level that had never been bestowed on her from her own parents, and regular lessons in how to kick undead ass had seemed nearly impossible in and of itself, supernatural abilities aside. Growing up as impoverished daughter of two alcoholics, one a member of the Irish Mafia, and both making it quite clear that Faith's existence was hardly a cherished fact in their lives, Faith had taken to heart the trailer trash label she was given early on and expected nothing more and certainly nothing better from herself or her lot in life. Having her Watcher, Diana Dormer, care not only about her behavior, but her nutrition, her health, her education, and most mind boggling to Faith of all, Faith herself, simply who she was as a person, was beyond anything Faith could quite comprehend. Being chosen as a Slayer had only pushed the improbable to the miraculous in Faith's eyes; it was later, with her Watcher's death and her own subsequent struggles after, that Faith thought she was finally living out the life she had always expected.
For Santana, discovering that she was a Slayer was undoubtedly going to be different than Faith's experience had been. The first trick would be getting her to believe it at all; the next would be to convince her that despite the immediate run of bad luck it had given her, with the unfortunate incident of the Hudson boy's death, her new abilities could eventually be a benefit.
Faith was so busy thinking of the younger girl, playing through various reactions she might have to her appearance in her life, that she hadn't seen Cordelia's fingers until they were snapping in front of her face, causing her to blink and barely squash her impulse to grab her wrist and force it down and away from her. Although Faith would never intentionally hurt Cordelia, it was sometimes difficult to lower her naturally defensive Slayer instincts even with the girl she trusted most.
"Hello, you are obviously not listening to a word I said, because not only is there a really unattractive glazed look in your eyes, I think there could be drool," Cordelia quipped, rolling her eyes at her, but she was smiling too in a way that Faith, if few others in her life, recognized as affectionate. She reached out to tug lightly at a wave of Faith's hair. "I'm saving you all the work here and you're still too mentally stimulated to even have a conversation? I'm not wearing anything showing cleavage so what gives?"
"Oh, I can picture your cleavage at will, any time, any place, whether you're gonna give up the goods or not," Faith said lightly, smirking back at Cordelia. As the other girl gave her shoulder a little shove but didn't lose her smile, Faith explained to her, "I was just thinking about the newby Slayer. Santana. You know, I kinda feel bad for the kid, is all. It's bad enough to kill someone when you know you're practically supergirl, and when you're doing it like in the line of duty or whatever and kind of expect shit can go down. But waking up one day and not even knowing you're different and then wham, someone's dead, that would really suck. It would be like all of a sudden you're a huge freak."
"Well, she's a Slayer, that's basically an alternative word for it," Cordelia shrugged, half serious, half kidding. But she was looking at Faith with something like amusement, her lips quirking further as she nudged her again. "Look at you, Miss Pillow Soft. Since when does get a bloody heart over spoiled teenagers?"
"Since you dug your stiletto heels into mine," Faith shot back, but she was smiling too as she moved back behind Cordelia and wrapped a loose arm around her waist, moving her hair aside to give her an audible and playful kiss on the neck. Cordelia squirmed, making as though she were going to move away from her as she made a noise as though disgusted, but she certainly didn't try very hard, and Faith could hear the smile in her voice as she replied.
"Touche."
Faith would have difficulty explaining in words to anyone who might ever ask just how it was that her relationship with Cordelia worked. The fact was, simply enough, that it did, through effort, compromise, and no shortage of shared burdens, difficulties, and caring. Although neither Cordelia nor Faith considered themselves to be lesbians, in the strictest sense of the word, there was definitely a relationship in place between them, and had been for the better part of the past three years. There was never a date where it became an official agreement between them, but rather a general time frame when it became unspoken and understood. Although technically Cordelia had the least to offer among the others in Angel Inc. when it came to magical powers and technological skills, it was she that Faith would trust and care for far and above any of the others. It wasn't a relationship that Faith was comfortable talking about very much, even with Cordelia, and answering questions from any nosy or stupid enough to ask was definitely not something she was willing to get into. But neither would they hide or deny what they felt for each other, although their way of showing it was often expressed through snark and playful touch rather than anything that the unobservant might see as straight up romance.
Everyone important in their lives knew the score, but most importantly of all, even without discussing it very often, Faith and Cordelia knew what they were to each other. That was really all that mattered.